[ExI] Religions are not the ultimate cause of war

[Charlie Stross]

On 1 Oct 2012, at 21:36, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> On 01/10/2012 21:05, Charlie Stross wrote:
>> You seem to have missed "the human concept of  "god" is a cognitive processing error -- we observe random events and are prone to ascribe them to purposeful behaviour, and our theory of mine then back-projects a conscious intelligence behind it".
>> 
>> In other words, *not* "there is no God" but "the concept of God is a cognitive malfunction".
> 
> I wonder how common this malfunction would be across intelligent species. Naturally evolved intelligent technological species are probably (?) mostly social species (since that way you can cheaply get more intelligence and cumulative cultural capital - it is hard to build a technological civilisation from loners).

(The carpal tunnel issues are interfering with my typing; I meant to say "theory of mind". )

I suspect theory of mind is going to inevitably evolve among non-sessile heterotrophs if we see a herbivore/carnivore split, simply because it's a devastatingly powerful defense/weapon in any predator-prey arms race. 

If we then add tool use, intentionality looks like a candidate for positive selection, as an adjunct to theory of mind. Which in turn implies inductive reasoning of the form "X is happening because Y wants it to happen". Apply that to the natural world, and solve for values of "Y = God". 

So, yes.

But note that we here are almost all acculturated within a range of societies that believed in *one* God (or possibly a multi-valent triune God). Polytheism is a high-probability alternative (arguably embodied in Catholicism, which did an embrace-and-extend on the various local pantheons within the Roman empire by turning the gods into saints).

> In the case of non-evolved species anything goes. On one hand the first generation would likely be created by an evolved species that might have views on their cognition, likely biasing it to be similar to theirs. But they would likely have potential to quickly evolve whatever agency detection they found useful ("the sign of purposeful behavior is that the origin metadata is signed by the public key of something listed in the intelligent person database!") So there could be both naturally atheist and religious artificial species... and likely religion-equivalent cognitive quirks that are far more bizarre to our perspective. Besides the obvious awareness of who the creators were. ("I am communing with the Creator every Tuesday. I mostly send him spam!")

Yeah. I suspect many first-gen artificial species will be conditioned/engineered to view their creators as gods. Could be a bit of a shock when they realize that they aren't ...



-- Charlie